The Historical Role of Communications Networks: A Conversation

Note: is article is an abridged transcript ofan interview with Richard R. John that was

conducted for the Chinese Communications StudiesRe view. e in terviewer was Gengxing Jin, an assis-tant professor of media and communications at theUniversity of Shanghai for Science and Tech -nology.

Dr. John received the 2011 AEJMC HistoryDi vision’s award for the best book of the year forhis Network Nation: Inventing American Telecom -muni cations. He’s also the author of Spreading theNews: e American Postal System from Franklin toMorse (1995). He teaches in Columbia University’sPh.D. program in communications and is a mem-ber of the core faculty of Columbia’s history depart-ment. He teaches courses on the history of capital-ism and the history of communications. His re -

search focuses on the history of business, technology, communications,and American political development. He received his Ph.D. in the his-tory of American civilization from Harvard University.

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The Historical Role of CommunicationsNetworks: A Conversation

By Richard R. John and Gengxing Jin ©

© 2021. The authors own the copyright to this article.

John

Jin

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I: Media and Modernity

Jin: From Spreading the News to Network Nation, “communications”has been a main focus of your research and writing. How did you firstbecome interested in the subject? And why does it matter for historians?

John: I came to the study of communications largely by accident. As agraduate student in the history of American civilization at Harvard inthe 1980s, I was looking around for a dissertation topic. My initial planwas to study how canonical American authors wrote about failure; itoccurred to me that a history of bureaucratic fatalism would be a goodplace to begin. I had written about industrial decline in early-twentieth-century New England in my undergraduate thesis, which I completedin 1981, also at Harvard (in social studies), and I was interested in ex -panding on this project.

e problem with bureaucratic fatalism was, how did one goabout studying its origins? When did it begin? It occurred to me that itwould make sense to ask: what was the first American bureaucracy? Ina lecture that I attended shortly after I began my graduate studies, thenineteenth-century U. S. historian David Donald observed almost inpassing that the first American bureaucracy was…the post office. Hewas glossing, I later figured out, a monograph on Jacksonian politics bythe political scientist Matthew A. Crenshaw. Donald’s observationabout the post office intrigued me. Why, not, I asked myself, organizemy dissertation around what a large number of contemporaries fromvarious walks of life thought about a single bureaucracy, rather than, ashad been my original idea, what a small number of canonical authorshad written about a large number of bureaucracies? is is how I decid-ed to write a dissertation about the post office: it was to be a case study

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in the origins of bureaucratic fatalism — a phenomena much in evi-dence in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, the America inwhich I grew up.

I did not immediately give up my interest in the history of failure,but I soon discovered, when I began to work in the sources, that bu -reaucratic fatalism was most emphatically not the lens through whichnineteenth-century Americans customarily viewed the post office. And,so, I lost interest in bureaucratic fatalism, and decided to explore insteadwhat Americans did in fact think about the post office.

While I had decided to write about the post office primarily becauseof my interest in American culture, I was not unaware that it was a largeorganization, and that large organizations were the specialty of AlfredD. Chandler, Jr., a historian I very much admired.

Chandler was a comparative institutionalist, a mode of inquiry thatI had been introduced to as an undergraduate, but which I had not ini-tially intended to pursue. Chandler’s scholarship — in combinationwith his almost obsessive curiosity, herculean commitment to research,personal modesty, and gentlemanly demeanor — made a great impres-sion on me. I have, incidentally, since written two review essays on hisoeuvre: if anyone is interested, links can be found at my Columbia web-site. Chandler’s presence at Harvard was one of the main reasons Idecided to stay on at Harvard for my Ph. D. He was the perfect com-plement to David Donald, the co-director of my dissertation. Chandlergot me interested in organizations, while Donald, a consummate liter-ary stylist and a legendary taskmaster, kept me on track.

To help me better understand how giant organizations worked, Isat in on a course on the sociology of communications taught by thesociologist Daniel Bell. e break-up of the Bell System was in thenews, and Bell devoted several lectures to this topic. It was here that I

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first learned about Harold Innis’s concept of the “bias” of communica-tions, a topic that I would write about in Spreading the News, and thathas remained an interest of mine ever since.

In looking back on my graduate years, I would add that there is atleast one additional reason that had nothing to do with my graduatetraining that helps explain why I ended up writing about the history ofan organization, and, in particular, a government agency. And this canbe found in the circumstances of my upbringing.

My father was a rocket scientist-turned government administrator(for many years he was director of the Volpe Transportation SystemCenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts); for this reason alone, it is per-haps not surprising that from an early age I had misgivings about histo-ries of the United States that left out, as most did, big business, com-munications networks, the military-industrial complex, and the state.

My immediate surroundings mattered as well. I grew up in Lexing -ton, Massachusetts, a town famous in the annals of American history asthe site of the first military encounter in the American War of Inde -pendence. While the trappings of Lexington’s colonial past remained,the Lexington I knew was a leafy, well-to-to bedroom suburb for pro-fessionals — doctors, professors, and engineers working on top-secretmilitary projects. e colonial past seemed far away. e United Statesand the USSR remained locked in a Cold War, the Vietnam War raged,and a post-Watergate cynicism pervaded public discourse.

During my high school summers, which coincided with the bicen-tennial of the American Revolution, I dressed up as a colonial militia-man to give public presentations on the Lexington Common to thethousands and thousands of tourists who had flocked to my home townto learn about the War of Independence. When I drove with tourists toConcord along the “Battle Road,” I could clearly see an air force base

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through the trees that had been planted to shield the “colonial” land-scape from the twentieth-century present. e juxtaposition was jarring:I was growing up in Leo Marx’s military-industrial complex in the gar-den.

ough Network Nation was considerably longer than Spreading theNews, it honed in on a narrower set of issues. My goal was to tell thehistory of the formative era of American telecommunication by tracingthe commercialization, popularization, and naturalization of two net-works, the telegraph and the telephone. When I began my research onthis project at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Centerin 1998-1999, it was conventional to study the early history of the tele-graph and telephone in relationship to developments that had takenplace in the recent past. As a historian, I chose the opposite approach:in stead of looking backward from the vantage post of the millennium,I looked forward from the early republic, a period that I knew prettywell, having recently completed my book on the post office. ough Idid not ignore entirely the influence of communications on society —an influence I had written a good deal about in Spreading the News —my primary goal was to document how society shaped communica-tions. Twelve years later, I published Network Nation.

Network Nation can be read as a supplement to, and even a critiqueof, a famous argument of Chandler’s. Chandler contended, in a bookthat he published in 1962 entitled Strategy and Structure, that businessstrategy could shape organizational structure. Building on, and modify-ing, Chandler’s strategy-structure thesis, I contended, in Network Na -tion, that political structure could shape business strategy. Chandler as -sumed that the influence on business strategy of the political structurehad been vastly overrated, and that, at least in the period before theSecond World War, governmental institutions reacted to changes that



originated inside organizations. Following the lead of the political soci-ologist eda Skocpol, a major source of inspiration from my graduatedays onward, I was determined to “bring the state back in.”

Let me now say something about why communications is, or oughtto be, a compelling subject for historians. Communications in my viewis a field rather than a discipline: it is too capacious to be studied in asingle way. In the English language, as a colleague who specializes in theGreek and Roman classics has reminded me, the words “communica-tions,” “communion,” and “community” are etymologically linked.Each is an expression of a mysterious process: action-at-a-distance. Ety -mology, of course, is not destiny. Yet these associations remind us thatcommunications has long been associated with some of the most pro-found dimensions of existence.

Action-at-distance is a metaphor not only for the mysterious gravi-tational force that holds the planets in their orbit, but also for the com-munion of souls. e “annihilation of space” that the poet AlexanderPope wrote about referred to the power of divine intervention to bringtogether distant lovers. John Durham Peter’s Speaking into the Air: AHistory of the Idea of Communication makes this point particularly effec-tively: to be credible, any explanation for action-at-a-distance has toreckon with the mysteries of the universe. e affinities between com-munications, communion, and community may help explain why somany media scholars are deeply religious. is was true, for example,not only of Peters, a devout Mormon, but also of Marshall McLuhan,James Carey, Walter Ong, Jacques Ellul and, with qualifications, Har -old Innis.

Yet communications is not only an otherworldly practice. For italso exists in the here-and-now. It is for this reason that I prefer to write“communications” with an “s” rather than “communication” without

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the “s.” e latter term, “communication,” is used more typically inEnglish to refer exclusively to the interpretation of a message, ratherthan to the means by which the message is shared.

Historical methods are useful for some communications-relatedprojects, but by no means for all. Even so, I do believe, given the re -markable expansion of information technology since the mid-eigh-teenth century, that the historically grounded exploration of communi-cations networks offers great promise for anyone interested in under-standing the rise of capitalism and the emergence of the nation-state.e study of communications networks can also provide rich insightsinto nationalism, democracy, scientific research, military strategy, socialpsychology, literary culture, mass society, religion, reform movements,and many other topics. Historians who are interested in these topicswould be well advised to pay more attention than they customarily donot only to the networks that circulate information, but also to themedium in which the information is conveyed. You don’t ask a fishabout water, McLuhan once quipped. e same has long been true ofcommunications. Only now, with the emergence of new forms of digi-tal media, is it becoming possible to begin to understand the mediaecology of the past. e owl of Minerva, as Hegel once wrote, flies atdusk. So too do historians of communications.

Jin: In Spreading the News and Network Nation, you show how the postof fice and telecommunications, as agents of change, helped to makeAmer ica. How do you understand the historical role of “communica-tions” in the nineteenth century? For example, do you build on DanielBell’s concept of an “information society”?

John: In Spreading the News I contended that the creation of a spatially


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extensive communications network in the period between 1792 and1835 helped to shape a nascent national identity for the inhabitants ofa far-flung commercial republic. Many people were left out of the imag-ined community, a point that I was aware of, and wrote about, but thatI would say even more about if I were writing this book today. But thisimagined community did exist, and it did not just happen: it was a de -liberate political achievement. Between 1835 and 1861, however, thesame network would create a cultural dynamic that would driveAmericans apart — laying the groundwork for a horrific civil war.

Daniel Bell’s concept of the “information society” does not providemuch insight into this story. I am quite certain about this, since I knewhim slightly, and attended two of his lecture courses, one in college andone in graduate school. Once I even once got up the courage to ask himif my own project could in any way fit into his “information society”model. Bell responded that it could not. e reason was simple. ForBell, information could not become an agent of change at any pointprior to the twentieth century, since it was only at this time that knowl-edge supplanted industry and agriculture as a mode of production.

I regard Bell’s perspective as unduly narrow. And I am not alone.Economic historians such as Joel Mokyr have long emphasized that theeighteenth-century European Enlightenment was a kind-of “informa-tion society”; others have made comparable claims for early modernEurope.

In retrospect, I have come to recognize in Bell’s tripartite stage-model a variant of the stage-based model of technical change thatChandler popularized in Visible Hand, a topic that I reflected on in twoessays that I published on Chandler’s oeuvre in the Business HistoryReview. And, while I am on the subject of historiography, I might takethe liberty of adding that I tried, in a 1995 essay on “American His -

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torians and the Concept of the Communications Revolution,” to fitBell’s “information society” into the broad sweep of American history.In this essay, and, in more detail in Spreading the News, I sketched someof the main features of a pre-electric telegraph “communications revo-lution” that had been organized around the mail, the stagecoach, theoptical telegraph, and the newspaper. It was this communications revo-lution that the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observed whenhe toured the United States in 1831-32, and that he would later writeabout in Democracy in America. In so doing, I helped to reintroduce theconcept of an early nineteenth-century “communications revolution” tothe lexicon of American historians; it would later be picked up by PaulStarr in his Creation of the Media, before becoming a centerpiece ofDaniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning What Hath GodWrought.

Jin: I am impressed by your contention that the invention of opticaltelegraphy in the 1790s and the establishment of postal distributioncenters in 1800, rather than the commercialization of the electric tele-graph in the 1840s, marked the epochal separation of communicationfrom transportation that James W. Carey and others have written somuch about. Do you think Carey would agree with you? Will our cur-rent view of the history of communications be revised accordingly?

John: Carey was one of the first media scholars I read, and one of thefirst scholars of any kind to write expansively about the electric tele-graph as an agent of change. For these reasons, I own him a great debt.Our relationship is not merely intellectual: When he died, I took hisposition at the Columbia Journalism School, where I now teach.

I only met Carey once. It was at a communications conference



somewhere in the United States, I can’t remember the city. e mediasociologist Michael Schudson — who, like myself, currently teaches inColumbia’s Ph. D. program in communications — facilitated the intro-duction, aware of our shared interest in the history of electric telegra-phy. I asked Carey about the priority of the optical telegraph in the sep-aration of communications from transportation. Carey responded thathe was aware of the existence of the optical telegraph, but remainedconvinced that the electric telegraph marked the key turning point. Weagreed to disagree. I can’t remember if we talked about the postal dis-tribution center.

I have found it gratifying that my revisionist arguments about theoptical telegraph and the postal distribution center are slowly beingaccepted, beginning with the publication in 2000 of Headrick’s WhenInformation Came of Age. In my view, Carey was unduly influenced byLewis Mumford, whose Technics and Civilization had been organizedaround the historical significance of different kinds of motive power asagent of change (wind, steam, electricity). Energy transitions matter,but so too does state-building, a factor that Carey downplayed. ForCarey, the “transmission”-binding bias in American communicationswas a cultural imperative rather than the byproduct of political fiat. InSpreading the News, I made the case for governmental institutions asagents of change.

e rediscovery of the optical telegraph owes something to nationalpride. e French government built the biggest optical telegraph net-work, and, perhaps not surprisingly, French historians have long as -signed the optical telegraph priority in the honor role of telecommuni-cations breakthroughs. I agree. As the field becomes more cosmopoli-tan, and we are less swept up in what Carey himself termed the rhetoricof the “electrical sublime,” I would guess that a new consensus might

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well emerge, in which the optical telegraph assumes its rightful place inthe annals of communications.

Since you asked about the postal distribution center, let me say abit more about this important yet often ignored institution. To trans-mit the mail around the country, administrators found it necessary tocreate a network in which certain offices were, in the language of net-work theory, nodes. ese nodes were the distribution centers, whichhad been formally established by the Federalist postmaster general Jo -seph Haber sham in 1800. eir establishment marked the decisivejuncture at which the transportation of the mail was distinguished fromits circulation, or what we could call its communication.

e millions and millions of pieces of mail that circulated in thenineteenth century depended on the administrative coordination thatthe managers of the distribution centers provided. For this reason, Iwould call them the nation’s first middle managers — a claim that AlChandler accepted as a revision to his contention that middle manage-ment originated in mid-nineteenth century railroads.

If we are serious about recognizing the role of communications net-works as agents of change, then it would seem hard to deny that themail, and not the telegraph, was the true “Victorian Internet.” Whenthis analogy becomes more widely acknowledged, then I would imaginethat even the postal distribution center will finally get the recognition itdeserves.

Jin: You object to “imputing agency” to technology and argue that tocontend that technological inventions led in some predetermined wayto the establishment of a particular organizational structure or businessstrategy is to “obscure the historical process by imputing agency to elec-trical equipment, batteries, and wires.” Yet I also notice that, in the



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introduction to Network Nation, you mention that the mail, the opticaltelegraph, the electric telegraph, and telephone were so different thatthey were organized in different ways. Could you please remind us whatyou mean by this?

John: e communications networks that I wrote about in Spreadingthe News and Network Nation were organized differently primarilybecause of the institutional arrangements in which they were embed-ded. ese institutional arrangements had little to do with the motivepower that facilitated the circulation of information, or what mediascholars sometimes call messages. It was, for example, entirely possiblefor an optical telegraph to be owned and operated not by the state, butby merchants, as was the case in the United States and Great Britain.

Political economy, and not motive power, held the key. In theUnited States, the optical telegraph and the post office emerged in a re -publican political economy; the telegraph in an anti-monopoly politicaleconomy; and the telephone in a progressive political economy. at is,the independent variable was not the motive power, but the po litical-economic rules of the game. Technology proposed; political economydi sposed.

II: Bringing Institutions Back In

Jin: Historical writing on telecommunications has been informed bydifferent interpretative traditions. e first is associated with the so-called Toronto School of Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan andtheir U. S. epigones James W. Carey and Neil Postman; its central con-cern is the challenging of counter-mythologies and the crafting of amedia-centric grand narrative. I wonder if omas Hughes’s Networks

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of Power could be put into this tradition, given his expansive under-standing of agents of change? en there is the comparative institution-al analysis approach, into which I would put your Network Nation andPaul Starr’s Creation of e Media: Political Origins of Modern Com -muni ca tion. In the closely related field of legal studies we can also thinkof e Master Switch by Tim Wu, although as you wrote in your fore-word to the Chinese edition of Network Nation, Wu’s book relied onoutdated secondary scholarship. e third approach is phenomenology,a tradition that can be stretched to include Claude Fischer’s AmericaCalling, Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New, andom as Streeter’s e Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the In -ter net.

John: Can we bring together these three quite different approaches?Much depends on what questions you are asking. If you are interested,as I am, in communications networks, then it seems to me that compar-ative institutionalism holds the most promise. In fact, when I was ingraduate school, I had hoped to work with Paul Starr (a Daniel Bell stu-dent); unfortunately, Starr didn’t get tenure at Harvard, which preclud-ed me from having him on my committee. I have already commentedon my indebtedness to Innis’s concept of communications “bias.” Phe -nomenology is trickier. Communications networks have indeed beenshaped by cultural norms, as Marvin and Streeter documented, andusers matter, as Fischer demonstrated. Yet none of these works reallyengages with political economy. is is not necessarily a problem,though it does point up some enduring, and very possibly unresolvable,tensions in the field.

Where Hughes fits is an interesting question. ough he regardedhimself as a contextualist, which in your tripartite scheme would prob-



ably align him with the phenomenologists, the causal significance heassigned to technological momentum has affinities with the internalismof Innis and McLuhan.

I would classify Hughes as a comparative institutionalist, though itis a tribute to the breadth of his vision that he might be put into eitherof your other two categories.

Let me say a bit more about Hughes, whom I met several times,and with whom I had numerous opportunities to exchange ideas.Hughes is best known for writing about big-city electrical power sta-tions, which he termed “systems.” I have learned a great deal from him— but, perhaps above all, he taught me about the importance of the cityas a unit of analysis.

Hughes’s approach to the history of technology was quite differentfrom my mentor, Alfred Chandler. Chandler was ultimately less inter-ested in the context in which large-scale organizations operated than intheir internal workings. In the useful terminology of John Staude n -maier, author of Technology’s Storytellers, this made Hughes a contextu-alist and Chandler an internalist. I have found the distinction betweeninternalism and contextualism useful in my own research. Like Hughes,I am a contextualist, even though I am drawn, as was Hughes himself,to the internalist agenda that preoccupied Chandler.

Hughes was more interested in language than Chandler, or, at least,he was more willing to talk about it. One year, at an annual meeting ofthe Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), Hughes and I wereon the same panel. In his presentation, if I remember correctly, he toldthe audience that he was a “systems” person and that I was a “networks”person. I am quite certain that he confided this to me in private. Eventhough I had earlier written a book with “system” in the title, when hemade this comment he was right. I remain sensitive to the problems

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with the “network” concept — problems that Leo Marx, RosalindWilliams, and many others have written about. Even so I find networkto be the best metaphor to describe the institutions that we have devisedto circulate information from person to person over large distances andat high speed.

As Hughes’s comments suggest, he and I have a lot in common.But in one regard we are quite different. In my writing, I have empha-sized the causal agency of the political economy, while Hughes hasremained committed to the organization — which, famously, he calledthe “system.” For Hughes, the regulatory environment was an after-thought; for me, it was constitutive. Price-and-entry regulation was aprecondition for the rise of the big-city telephone exchange, not a con-sequence of its rise. Politics for Hughes mucked thing up; I regard it asgenerative. Even so, Hughes — who, after all, was an exemplary histo-rian in every regard — definitely influenced my thinking about units ofanalysis. Following his example, I have come to conceive of the urbantelephone exchange as a system embedded in a larger regional, interre-gional, and, eventually, even national network. My characterization ofthe mail as “system” in Spreading the News also owed something toHughes — though, as I noted above, I have since become more of a“networks” person than a “systems” person.

Wu’s Master Switch, while influential, is quite derivative and lack-ing in analytical heft, as Paul Duguid and Paul Starr documented indevastating reviews. While Wu wrote in a fluid and engaging style, heoverplayed the importance of maverick inventors, neglected the key roleof municipal governments in the regulatory process, and echoed Bellpublic relations hype in his characterization of Vail, whose presciencehe overstated, and long-distance telephony, whose significance he exag-gerated.



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Fischer made too much of the conversational habits of housewivesin explaining the popularization of the telephone, a common mistake inmuch of the scholarship published around the time he completed hisresearch. e telephone, not the telegraph, was the first electrically me -diated communications medium to have been configured as a mass serv-ice for the entire population, rather than a specialty service for an exclu-sive clientele. e concepts “mass service” and “specialty service,” inci-dentally, pay homage to the distinction that historian of technologyPhil Scranton made between “mass” and “specialty” production.

But the question remains: who did the configuring? e key actorswere not the users who discovered new ways of communicating by tele-phone — by inventing, as Fischer put it, “sociability” — but, instead,the managers of the big-city operating companies who recognized thatthey could make money — and, not incidentally, insulate themselvesfrom political pressure — by aggressively marketing telephone service tothe entire population. In both Chicago and New York City, this shiftoccurred around 1900 — long before Fischer’s California housewivesbegan gossiping on-line.

e most intriguing challenge to my argument in my view hascome not from Fischer, but from Robert MacDougall. In his splendidbook, e People’s Network, MacDougall has made an intriguing casefor the agency in the 1890s of telephone users in mid-western U. S.cities in convincing the managers of non-Bell independent telephoneoperating companies to popularize the new medium. Users matter.Even so, the kind of technical, administrative, and political challengesthat these independent telephone companies confronted were far lesscomplex than the challenges that faced big-city telephone companies inChicago and New York City. For this reason, I regard 1900 — a con-venient date, since it ushered in a new century — as a landmark in the

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history of telecommunications, since it marked the approximatemoment at which big-city telephone companies shifted from providinga specialty service for an exclusive clientele to providing a mass servicefor the entire population. Popularization and sociability are not thesame thing. And even if you find MacDougall’s account of telephonepopularization more compelling — in my view it is a matter of big cities(John) versus middle sized towns (McDougall), with the most impor-tant technical, administrative, and marketing innovations originating inthe former (John) — the shift he described had nothing to do withFischer’s California housewives.

Five books that you didn’t mention, but that, in my view, makenotable contributions to our understanding of communications net-works in the period between the 1840s and the 1910s, are BenSchwantes’s Train and the Telegraph; Simone Müller’s Wiring theWorld; Christopher Beauchamp’s Invented by Law; Heidi Tworek’sNews over Germany; and Robert MacDougall’s People’s Network. I canalso recommend, as a very readable general history of the U. S. post of -fice, Winifred Gallagher’s How the Post Office Created America.

Jin: e “romantic individualism” narrative that foregrounds a hero orinventor has long enjoyed a privileged place in the history of technolo-gy. Network Nation is a corrective to this narrative. e “romantic indi-vidualism” narrative continues to dominate today’s tech media coverageand popular discourse, except that we now focus not on Samuel Morseor eodore Vail but on Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Why dopeople at different times find “romantic individualism” so compelling?How does Network Nation counter “romantic individualism”?

John: Romantic individualism sells books, and, by no means inciden-



tally, wins patent battles. is is particularly true in the United States,where, until recently, the patent office recognized as the rightful inven-tor not the first to file, but the first to invent, a topic that Beauchampexplored with great sensitivity in Invented by Law.

e almost always laudatory, and, indeed, often fawning, preoccu-pation of today’s journalists and tech insiders with the current genera-tion of high-tech moguls is a byproduct not only of the influence theywield as owners and managers, but also of public relations hype. PR ispart of history, and historians have an obligation to do all we can todescribe it, explain how it works, and prevent it from distorting the his-torical record.

Hype is a neglected factor in historical writing, not only becausepublicity has and can shape the course of events, but also because it caninform historical interpretation. e idealization of Jobs and Zucker -berg is but the most recent chapter in the long history of the influenceof corporate public relations on business history. Morse needed public-ity to sell his telegraph patent rights; Vail used the press to blunt callsfor government ownership. Individuals matter in history, but they don’talways make history as they please. If, however, they have a capableenough PR team, they can do their best to make sure that their versionof events ends up in the history books. e same, needless to say, canbe said of corporations, political parties, and nations.

To underscore my point about hype, let me retell a story that Irecounted in Network Nation. e inability of Samuel Morse to securea market for his invention helps explain why his backers (including thepatent commissioner) praised it to the skies. How else could he win thecongressional support he needed to convince Congress to buy him out?

Morse’s electric telegraph became famous not because it was thefirst to be commercialized: it was not, having been preceded by the

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commercialization in Great Britain of an electric telegraph that hadbeen invented by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.

Why then do we remember Morse and not Cooke and Wheat -stone? In large part, because of the influence of hype on the course ofevents — and on history writing.

Morse had no choice but to publicize his telegraph. is wasbecause, unlike Cooke and Wheatstone, Morse lacked a reliable market.Cooke and Wheatstone had discovered that railroads would pay to usethe electric telegraph as a signaling device. is was not true of railroadsin the United States, as Ben Schwantes demonstrated in his prize-win-ning Train and e Telegraph. And so Morse was stuck: he had to pub-licize the telegraph, since, unlike Cooke and Wheatstone, he didn’thave a reliable user that was willing to foot the bill.

To tempt investors, Morse’s silent partner Francis O. J. Smithpraised Morse to the skies (even though Smith personally despisedMorse as a charlatan and a fool). Morse’s invention also received lavishcoverage in patent commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth’s annualreports. Morse’s invention helped Ellsworth not only to boost the rep-utation of the government agency over which he presided, but also toadvertise American inventive genius in an age in which Great Britainproclaimed itself the “workshop of the world.”

Another consideration may well have shaped Ellsworth’s decision.Morse had fallen hopelessly in love with Ellsworth’s daughter, Anne —as Ellsworth well knew — raising the possibility that, by boostingMorse, Ellsworth may have been helping to try to secure for his daugh-ter a handsome dowry. Anne is best known as the woman who is cred-ited with choosing for the first telegraph message the Biblical phrase“What Hath God Wrought.” For Morse, she was, or so he hoped, hisfuture bride.



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Morse’s “romantic individualism” was very different from the aurathat has come to surround Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Morse wasan artist and not a promoter and he had no interest in commercializingthe new medium himself. Instead, Morse hoped to sell his invention tothe very government that had awarded him his patent. Ellsworth — thepatent commissioner — did everything he could to close the deal. Nicework if you can get it. e only problem was, Congress wouldn’t goalong — and much to Morse’s chagrin the telegraph was commercial-ized as a private enterprise.

What began as hype became history, and, over time, a publicitycampaign gone wrong became transmogrified into a simple-mindedfairy tale about Morse’s genius. In this retelling, Morse fought single-handedly against all manner of adversaries, and Anne Ellsworth becamenot Morse’s love interest, but merely a star-stuck little girl in the pres-ence of the Great Man.

Morse was by no means the last American telegraph promoter toturn to publicity to improve his position. In the 1870s and 1880s, JayGould, then the nation’s most notorious financial speculator, manipu-lated the press on numerous occasions to affect the price of WesternUnion shares — another media event that I documented in detail inNetwork Nation.

Publicity was, if anything, even more consequential for the historyof the telephone. To blunt public pressure for government ownership,Bell publicists popularized the idea that long-distance telephony wasone of the technical wonders of the age. If the public identified Bell asinnovative, lawmakers would be less inclined to buy it out.

Jin: We cannot, of course, ignore the importance of culture in the pop-ularization of the telephone. As we know, Carolyn Marvin’s When Old

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Technologies Were New emphasizes cultural determinants such as gen-der. In Network Nation you mentioned that office clerks in Chicagogossiped about sports on the telephone, yet Claude Fischer thinks thatwomen in small towns in California drove the popularization of thetelephone, and in my research, I found that women in Shanghai werequite enthusiastic about shopping by telephone. What then was moreimportant, culture or institutions?

John: e one-sentence answer is that institutions and culture bothmatter, but that I have found, in my research, that institutions mattermore.

I am not surprised that Shanghai women liked to shop by tele-phone. Many women in the United States did too. Yet I have not seenany evidence that telephone shopping posed a problem for operatingcompany managers. Women rarely lived in big-city commercial centers,the epicenter of telephone congestion. Telephone managers in the1890s and 1900s devoted a great deal of thought and resources to re -ducing the call-connection delay. Office clerks clogging telephone linesto gossip about sports and their personal affairs was one of the most dis-ruptive factors that they could not control. Fischer mostly wrote aboutthe post-First World War period, long after the initial popularization ofthe telephone in Chicago and New York City, which, as I observed inmy response to a previous question, occurred around 1900.

e business strategy of big-city Bell-affiliated telephone companieshelps to explain why telephone managers in the 1890s occasionallyblamed women for gossiping on-line. Garrulous male office clerksposed a more serious operational problem, since the most congestedtelephone exchanges were located in the downtown business district,which was in this period an overwhelmingly male preserve. Blaming



women for a problem that had in fact been caused by men helped tele-phone company officials maintain good relations with their most valu-able customers — that is, the businessmen who paid for flat-rate tele-phone service. e vilification of women as loquacious gossips helped todiscredit flat-rate telephone billing, hastening the shift in Chicago, NewYork, and several other big-city exchanges to measured service.Operator-assisted switching was expensive, impeding telephone popu-larization. Local flat-rate service would not return until several decadeslater, following the widespread introduction of the automatic telephoneexchange.

Jin: Specialists in media and communication studies are often fascinat-ed by the newness of a particular technology, especially if it can be plau-sibly characterized as path-breaking. People tend to constantly projecttoo many unrealistic aspirations onto new media objects and turn a deafear to the institutional or cultural contexts embedded in technology.Since both the postal system and the telephone were once “new media,”how does Spreading the News and Network Nation deal with “newness”?

John: e novelty of the telegraph was a problem for its first promoters,since, at least at first, they had no reliable market. is circumstancegoes far toward explaining, as I have already discussed, why there was somuch more effusive commentary about the telegraph in the UnitedStates than in Great Britain, and why we remember American telegraphinventor Samuel Morse and not the British inventors William Cookeand Charles Wheatstone. Cooke and Wheatstone had the railroad:Morse looked to Congress to buy him out.

e telephone was less novel than the telegraph: it was basically ahigh-end message delivery service. It is worth recalling, for example,

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that the average distance of a telephone call originating in 1900 in Chi -cago (then the second largest city in the United States) was a mere 3.4miles. is is one reason, among many, that the telephone was lesshyped. Merchants, professionals, and industrialists had a pressing needto remain in touch with their suppliers and customers. If the call-con-nection delay could be reduced — a big “if,” at least in the 1880s, giventhe limited state-of-the-art of switchboard design — and the networkwas built up enough to connect the right kind of people, business userswere willing to foot the bill.

Newness, in short, is not only or even primarily an intrinsic attrib-ute of a network; no less significant was the political, economic, andcultural setting in which the network evolved. In some instances, in -deed, newness can be little more than promotional hype.

III: Politics Had Artifacts

Jin: In one passage in Network Nation, you include a very importantphrase: “politics had artifacts.” How do you interpret that? Is this areversal of Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

John: I was indeed thinking of Winner — a political theorist whosework I much admire. Winner’s basic unit of analysis was the technicalartifact — such as a bridge or a nuclear power plant. He is concernedwith the effects of these artifacts on political forms and cultural norms.My unit of analysis is the political economy. e telegraph and the tele-phone evolved differently for reasons that had less to do with technolo-gy or economics than with politics and culture. Winner is less interestedin this relationship, which is why I found useful his provocative ques-tion “do artifacts have politics?” By recasting it, I highlighted a contrast



in emphasis and in method.

Jin: Your book argues that though the telephone is technically indebtedto the telegraph, organizationally it is closer to the mail. How do youdistinguish innovation from invention, and what do you mean by thatdistinction?

John: e telegraph and the telephone both rely on electricity as amotive power. But they are otherwise quite different. e first tele-phone operating companies had more in common with message deliv-ery services and gas works than with telegraph companies. When eo -dore Vail became president of Bell, he built on his experience at thePost Office Department. Innovation is the scaling up of invention,through its commercialization. When an invention became widely used,it became a genuine innovation, making it for the comparative institu-tionalist, the more appropriate subject for inquiry.

e maintenance of communications networks is also, I might add,a worthy topic for research. ough I didn’t write about maintenancemuch in either Spreading the News or Network Nation, it has beendrawn to my attention as a historical subject by Lee Vinsel and AndrewL. Russell in their influential recent book, e Innovation Delusion.

Jin: We know that technology is a central force and driving mechanismin capitalism, with the business firm as its primary institutional unit.How did Network Nation place itself at the intersection of three differ-ent academic genres: the history of technology, business history, andcomparative institutionalism?

John: Network Nation explored the relationship between the political

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economy and the certain technically advanced business enterprises, ofwhich the largest and most powerful were Western Union, the BellSystem, and the largest big-city telephone operating companies, includ-ing the Chicago Telephone Company and the New York TelephoneCompany. I tried to identify key decision makers (as is de rigueur for abusiness history), and to show how technical artifacts, such as the tele-phone switchboard, evolved (as is customary for a history of technolo-gy). I was also interested in the political economy in which these organ-izations operated (a keynote of comparative institutionalism).

A fourth subfield that I drew upon, incidentally, is known asAmerican Political Development (or APD). is subfield, which origi-nated in political science, emphasizes path dependence, heuristics, andinstitutional legacies. Each of these concepts has proved very useful inmy thinking about communications networks.

Jin: I read Network Nation as part of an academic dialogue between youand your mentor, Alfred Chandler, Jr. In Visible Hand, Chandler chart-ed the rise of the salaried managerial class in organizing and runninglarge-scale enterprises, and contended that the corporation’s organiza-tional structure developed in response to its business strategy. Youargue, in contrast, that the business strategy of communications firmssuch as Western Union and Bell had been shaped by political structures(governmental institutions and civic ideals). But I notice that the finalchapter of Network Nation affirms the value of managerial capitalism, asyou refer to the rise of Bell’s managerial elite as a self-perpetuating classthat resisted the financial pressure of investors, while they negotiatedand compromised with the government. is elite was the coordinatorthat made the Bell System work. Does this go back to Chandler’s argu-ment?


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John: is question gets to the heart of a topic that, in retrospect, I havecome to regard as central to the argument I made in the final chapter ofNetwork Nation: the legitimation of the managerial corporation. It is atopic that I have returned to now in my current project on anti-monop-oly thought.

When I began my research for Network Nation, I assumed, follow-ing Chandler, that the railroad was the first managerial corporation, andthat the managerial corporation originated in the 1850s, when the fourEast Coast trunk lines crossed the Appalachian Mountains. Middleman agement in government, it bears repeating, had existed in the PostOffice Department since 1800: someone had to staff the distributionscenters. In business, however, middle management — and with it, themanagerial corporation, would not emerge until mid-century.

Chandler wrote more in Visible Hand about the railroad than thetelegraph. Yet when Chandler wrote about the telegraph, he followedRobert Luther ompson’s Wiring a Continent, which had character-ized Western Union as a “natural” monopoly following its takeover ofits two primary rivals in 1866. ompson reached this conclusion, I amconvinced, because he was trying to find a convenient way to wrap uphis book, which had devoted many chapters to the pre-Civil War peri-od. To justifying ending his book in 1866, he mystified the history ofthe telegraph for the rest of the century.

For Chandler, then, the managerial corporation had been legitimat-ed in both transportation and communication by 1866.

My research led me to raise questions about both of these claims.ough the railroad did have multiple layers of management, it wouldonly slowly acquire legitimacy as a managerial enterprise, that is, an en -terprise that, while ostensibly owned by its shareholders, was in factoperated by and for a self-perpetuating managerial elite. Richard White

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has made this point quite effectively in Railroaded, his recent history ofthe transcontinental railroad, in which he shows how financial insiders,rather than expert managers, dominated the inner circles of the first rail-road corporations to span the continent.

Similarly, while Western Union was the dominant network pro -vider in 1866, no one regarded its ascendancy as apolitical.

For these reasons, I would now date the ascendancy of the manage-rial corporation to the 1910s, rather than to the mid-nineteenth centu-ry. For it was only at this time that the managerial corporation becamewidely accepted as a legitimate form of business enterprise.

Chandler sidestepped the question of legitimacy by downplayingthe influence on the business enterprise of governmental institutionsand civic ideals. In addition, he wrote virtually nothing about the publicrelations campaigns that corporate managers launched to legitimatetheir enterprises. Bell managers invented corporate public relations inthe 1910s to forestall a government takeover, and ramped up their ef -forts following the U. S. entry in the First World War in 1917. PR mat-ters, even if its significance is often downplayed, forgotten, and re -pressed. Roland Marchand’s magnificent Creating the Corporate Soul —which brilliantly dissected Bell’s 1910s PR campaign — showed howthe process worked.

IV: e Long History of Anti-Monopoly

Jin: In your study of the history of telecommunications you demon-strate that anti-monopoly has fostered innovation, and that market seg-mentation, municipal franchise regulation, and government entrepre-neurship have led to a series of highly innovative communication sys-tems from the Post Office Department to the Bell System. Why is a net-



work organization like Bell more likely to acquire a monopoly thanother firms? Why were policies such as uniform rates (or what todaymight be called “net neutrality”) counterproductive?

John: e willingness of contemporaries to invest great significance inwhat economists today call network externalities can help explain whythe Bell System took the form that it did. By 1907, for example, tele-phone experts agreed that rival big-city telephone operating companieswere wasteful, a huge win for Bell. is outcome, however, was a con-sequence not only of technology and economics, but also of politics andculture.

Municipal franchise law established the rules of the game, and itcould be very expensive to obtain the urban rights-of-way necessary tostring telephone wires. Political corruption was endemic and many cityofficials were in on the take.

e specter of corrupt city aldermen profiting from municipal fran-chise politics greatly troubled reformers. Ending intra-city telephonecompetition was one way to limit graft. Telephone company managersagreed. By re-envisioning telephone service as not a privilege but a right— a shift that hastened, and was in part hastened by, the rapid expan-sion of their user base — they built an electoral bloc interested in goodtelephone service that was large enough to enable them to prevailagainst corrupt city officials.

What deserves emphasis, in short, is the creative role of governmentregulation, and in particular, in the case of the telephone, municipalfranchise law. Regulation can foster innovation that makes the fruits ofinvention accessible to all. In the case of the telephone, it hastened itspopularization — which I defined as the reconfiguration of a specialtyservice for an exclusive clientele as a mass service for the entire popula-

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tion. e telegraph was more lightly regulated than the telephone: pre-

dictably enough, it was much less innovative. e only exception was abrief period of hothouse growth in the 1870s that had been spurred bythe anti-monopoly National Telegraph Act of 1866. e NationalTelegraph Act had been intended to promote competition among tele-graph network providers, and for a brief period, it worked. Taking ad -vantage of the act’s provisions, rival telegraph magnates William Ortonand Jay Gould squared off in an epic contest to gain control of patentsheld by the inventors omas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. In aremarkably short period of time, the Edison-Bell rivalry led to fourblockbuster inventions: broadband telegraphy, the telephone, the pho -no graph, and the electric power station.

e telephone was always highly regulated, and, with a few excep-tions, such as automatic telephony, the Bell System would remain formuch of the twentieth-century — and especially following the estab-lishment of Bell Labs in 1925 — a world leader in churning out block-buster inventions of all kinds. Telegraph rates varied by type of user(news brokers got lower rates than merchants); telephone rates variednot only by user type (business versus residential) but also by variousother criteria (including quality of service). Beginning in 1910, Con -gress declared the telegraph and the telephone to be common carriersunder federal law. Common carriage did not oblige network providersto charge the same price for the same service, as proponents of “net neu-trality” would later advocate; rather, it fostered a byzantine array ofcross subsidies that would remain central to the Bell System until itscourt-ordered dissolution in 1984.

Net neutrality is not neutral. On the contrary, it is biased in favorof information-intensive Big Tech platforms such as Google, Amazon,



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and Netflix to the disadvantage of information service providers, brick-and-mortar retailers, and the press. Telephone rates were always regu-lated — first at the municipal level and for much of the twentieth cen-tury at the state level. No one regarded these regulations as neutral; onthe contrary, they were intended to promote a particular vision of thecommon good.

Jin: How is the monopoly power of today’s Big Tech platforms differ-ent from the monopoly power of the industrial trusts of a century ago,such as Standard Oil and the Bell System? How can the historical tra-dition of anti-monopoly in telecommunications help us critically thinkabout monopoly today?

John: ese are searching questions that lie at the heart of the “newBrandeisian” critique of Big Tech platforms that FTC commissionerLina Khan has embraced, drawing on the work of non-neoclassical eco -nomists, historians, and journalists.

Let me highlight a few comparisons that may help to provide a per-spective on current events. First: my premise. Big Tech publicists haverepeatedly tried to convince the public that we are living in a brave newworld in which all the rules have changed. is is simply not true. BigTech continues to operate in a political economy that was built up overthe decades. By challenging the hype, historians can underscore themerits of longstanding principles such as common carriage, market seg-mentation, and even municipal price-and-entry regulations.

Common carriage — that is, the presumption that a network pro -vider has an obligation to provide access to a service on a non-preferen-tial basis — is a cornerstone of American communications policy.Common carriage is not the same thing as net neutrality: cross subsi-

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dization has been the norm, with different classes of information payingdifferent rates. Within a class, however, all information has been treatedalike.

Market segmentation has shaped U. S. communications policy forover one hundred years. e 1913 McReynolds settlement, for exam-ple, which is often misleadingly called the Kingsbury Commitment —thanks in large part to Bell public relations hype — forced Bell to selloff its shares in Western Union, which it had acquired in 1909. oughthe McReynolds settlement is rarely featured in histories of U. S. com-munication policy, it had far reaching consequences, since it doomedVail’s vision of “universal service,” which Vail understood to embracelow-cost short-distance telephone service and low-cost long-distancetelegraph service. To put the first great Big Tech anti-trust settlementin terms that might be easier to grasp, the McReynolds settlement cost“AT&T” its second “T”: AT&T, after all, stands for “American Tele -phone & Telegraph.”

Anti-trust pressure in the 1920s blocked Bell from becoming aplayer in radio broadcasting. In 1956, the justice department obligedBell to license its patents on a non-preferential basis, and to exit thecomputer business; in 1984, it chose to give up its operating companiesto settle yet another antitrust suit, opening up the market to rivals thatin the years to come would hasten a great deal of experimentation in thetelecommunications sector. Anti-trust is not the only regulatory toolthat the government has at its disposal. Yet it reminds us that the futureof telecommunications need not resemble its past.

Municipal price-and-entry regulations were of enormous signifi-cance in the early years of the telephone business, and in the UnitedStates would remain in place until 1996. e absence of such regula-tions in Canadian cities — as Robert MacDougall has demonstrated —



slowed the popularization of telephone service, a nice illustration of theanalytical potential of comparative institutionalism.

V: Toward a Digital Future

Jin: It has been over ten years since the publication of Network Nation.e past decade has seen the emergence of a global point-to-point dig-ital interconnected society, and the invasion of our daily lives by the BigTech platforms. If we were to extrapolate from your argument, wemight conclude that these changes have been “products not only oftechnological imperatives and economic incentives, but also of govern-mental institutions and civic ideals.” Given the upcoming publicationof the Chinese translation of Network Nation, why is the U. S. experi-ence important for readers in different institutional and cultural con-texts, such as China?

John: ough the U. S. political economy is very different fromChina’s, political interventions in both countries have powerfullyshaped the institutional order. Big Tech platforms are, in one form oranother, here to stay. Yet their power can be constrained.

Decentralization can be planned, as Chandler reminded us in hispioneering books and articles on the American corporation. Planneddecentralization is also, of course, a hallmark of federalism — a corner-stone of the American experiment in self-government.

In the years since the publication of Network Nation, it has becomeincreasingly evident to thoughtful lawmakers from across the politicalspectrum that Big Tech imperils the constitutional order that has tradi-tionally fostered the common good. Amazon, Facebook, and Google —to name but three of today’s High Tech behemoths — have become

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powerful actors on the global stage, with a raft of implications for inno-vation, inequality, and civic norms.

e U. S. experience can help Chinese leaders recognize that mar-kets are politically constructed. Anti-monopoly laws have proved effec-tive in segmenting markets to promote what contemporaries called “fairtrade,” while common carriage regulations have bolstered insurgentnew entrants and restrained incumbents. Municipal regulation, a regu-latory tool that is often disparaged by policy analysts, has proved sur-prisingly effective in popularizing new media, such as municipal broad-band.

Jin: In the introduction of Network Nation, you wrote that “the net-work metaphor highlights the spatiality of early American telecommu-nications.” Chicago and New York played a crucial role in the early his-tory of American telephony. Similarly, the port cities Shanghai andTianjin have played an important role in Chinese telecommunications.My question, then, is twofold: on the one hand, what does a city meanto a telecommunications network? on the other hand, what does thetelecommunications network mean to the city?

John: Cities have for centuries been seedbeds of innovation not only inbusiness, but also in public policy. Nowhere is this more true than intelecommunications. Spatial propinquity can help create a fertileground for the implementation of new methods and techniques. Re -curring contests over rights-of-way created incentives that hastenedpopularization, especially if municipal price-and-entry regulations re -mained in place. Unfortunately, historians of telecommunications rou-tinely assume that the nation is the most relevant unit of analysis, put-ting at center stage an actor that, at least in the formative era of the tele-


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phone, properly belongs in the wings. e critical role of the city as an agent of change was one of the

most important discoveries that I made in the course of researchingNetwork Nation. I had not initially intended to write about big-city tele-phone operating companies; in fact, when I discovered how prominent-ly they figured in the documentary record, I initially felt demoralized.How was I possibly going to finish a project that had already taken memore time than I had anticipated? I had two small children at the time,and I was eager to get on with my life. And so too, perhaps needless tosay, was my wife!

Once I discovered how important cities were to the early history ofthe telephone, I had what one might describe as a gestalt shift. A subjectthat virtually every other historian of communications had regarded asperipheral, with the notable exceptions of Robert MacDougall, Meig -han Maguire, and Robert Horwitz, turned out to be absolutely central.Spatial propinquity mattered, not only for telephone managers copingwith the unprecedented challenge of shortening the call-connection de -lay in big-city telephone exchanges, but also for telephone inventors.

Chicago and New York City were the key sites of innovation, withChicago being ground zero. In both cities, municipal franchise law setthe stage. Yet people mattered too. In Chicago, the popularization ofthe new medium owed much to the visionary leadership of Angus Hib -bard, the manager of the Bell-affiliated Chicago Telephone Company.In the 1890s, Hibbard introduced innovative high-speed operator-assisted switchboards, experimented with new kinds of telephone sets— including the pay-as-you-go nickel-in-the-slot — and devised newbilling schemes that helped to shift telephone users from flat rate tomeasures service. Hibbard’s strategy effectively mobilized the city’sdense network of technical expertise: the Chicago Telephone Com -

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pany’s downtown telephone exchanges were located a short distancefrom the massive factories of Western Electric, Bell’s equipment suppli-er. Flat rates were regressive: they favored big-business users and imped-ed widespread adoption. With the introduction of measured service, itbecame for the first time commercially feasible to provide at least a basiclevel of service to the entire population. By 1900, a new age had begun.

Jin: My last question relates to the history of technology. e globalCOVID-19 pandemic highlighted the indispensability of informationand communications technology (ICT) for parcel delivery and socialinteraction — e.g. in academic conferences organized through Zoomand Tencent. ICT is fast becoming a focus for research throughout thehumanities and the social sciences. One is reminded of this statementby Mark Poster: “One cannot but see earlier developments from the sit-uation of the present.” Are institutions today different from the institu-tions you studied?

John: In the United States, China, and many other nations, Big Techposes lawmakers with a modern-day variant of the imperio in imperiumproblem that perplexed political theorists in the Middle Ages. In thepresent, as in the past, politics have artifacts and political structureshapes business strategy. But what is the relevant political unit? e po -litical economy that shaped the telegraph and the telephone in theUnited States was at once national, subnational, and transnational.When we think about ICT today, we might want to keep this in mind:the nation is not the only, and in some instances not even the most con-sequential, unit of analysis.

More communications is not necessarily the same thing as bettercommunications either now or in the past. Historical inquiry can show



how mutual understanding has strengthened essential social bonds, pro-moted worthwhile innovations, and fostered moral progress. Yet noth-ing is certain and, if things go badly, poor communications is, as anindependent factor, rarely to blame. In interpersonal relations, as wellas in our fleeting attempts to glimpse eternity, misunderstanding is afeature and not a bug.

Let me add, as a final observation, that I am very grateful for thecare you have taken in reading my work and posing such searching andwell-informed questions. I have learned a good deal from this exchange,and look forward to learning more about your own promising researchon the history of Chinese telecommunications.

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Documents

The Historical Role of Communications Networks: A Conversation